Press Contact

UNH Information

DURHAM, N.H. -- Two University of New Hampshire professors have been named
Fellows of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Karen Von Damm and Joseph Hollweg, both faculty members in UNH's Institute for
the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space and College of Engineering and Physical
Sciences, were recently elected as fellows, an honor which distinguishes them as
scientists who have "attained acknowledged eminence in the geophysical sciences."

Von Damm, UNH professor of earth sciences, has been on the UNH faculty since
1992 and was named the university's Outstanding Associate Professor in 1996. Her
research interests are water-rock interactions and the controls these, and other
processes, exert on the chemistry of natural waters. A particular research area in
which she is quite active is the chemistry of "black smoker" hot springs on the sea
floor and their fluxes into the ocean.

Von Damm recently lead a team of 23 researchers on an undersea voyage in the
eastern Pacific to explore a mountain range of active volcanoes erupting lava that
forms new ocean floor. These deep-sea explorations are rare due to the extreme
challenges of bringing people and machines down far beneath the sea surface. Her
voyage can be followed at the Web site http://divediscover.sr.unh.edu.

Hollweg, UNH professor of space physics, directs UNH's Solar Terrestrial Theory
Group, one of only three space theory groups nationwide that have received
continuous funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's
Sun-Earth Connections Theory Program since it's inception in 1980. The group's
research uses theoretical plasma physics to understand energetic phenomena on the
Sun and in space. These phenomena include solar flares and mass ejections, the
Sun's superheated corona and its continuously outflowing solar wind, and the origin
of energetic cosmic rays at the Sun and throughout the solar system.

Hollweg was awarded the 1992 James Arthur Prize for Solar Physics by the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and has been teaching at UNH since
1980.

AGU, a nonprofit scientific organization comprised of scientists and students
worldwide, was established in 1919 to promote the scientific study of Earth and its
environment in space and to disseminate the results to the public.